Dahab, Egypt There are a gazillion things to observe when on the road, and here's one of my favorites: the books people read. Anytime you see someone reading a book, they're traveling. There is of course the geographic location in which they are actually reading. The English fellow above, for example, is sitting on the...

southwestern Cambodia In Paul Theroux's Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town , he describes the journal entry made by a 19th-century visitor to an Egyptian temple. In the entry we read that an Arab man is taking measurements of the temple. We also read that while this is happening "a yellow cow,...

The New York Times travel section is recently dedicated to covering the Far East: 37 Asian Odysseys . Although the media is dominated by coverage of Japan's natural and nuclear disaster, the rest of the continent is humming along as usual. With booming economies and traditional cultures, Asia has long had a special place in...

Cairo, Egypt When I returned to the United States this past weekend after spending six weeks in the Middle East, I didn’t have all that much in my backpack. One thing I had almost packed but didn’t was a chunk of rock. It was one of thousands thrown outside my Cairo hostel, by Tahrir Square,...

Cairo, Egypt “Right now Egypt is like having a fast pass at Disney. People should come over.” These are the words of Rick Zeolla, the general manager of the Cairo Marriott, quoted last week in a New York Times article titled " Tahrir Square, Egypt's New Tourist Draw ." In that same article, the general...

Cairo, Egypt This past Friday, I was on a hostel roof talking with a Hungarian journalist when a tremendous roar, straight out of the lungs of tens of thousands of Egyptians, swept through the streets and over Cairo’s Tahrir Square . We stood and ran to a better vantage point to see if the sound...

Damascus, Syria "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," wrote Charles Dickens in the opening line of A Tale of Two Cities . He was referring to life in an area of Europe in the late 1700s, but one could also feasibly slap this line into a book about overnights...

Maaloula, Syria If passing through the Syrian town of Maaloula , particularly if you are passing by the slightly expensive restaurant some 100 meters shy of the entrance to Mar Thecla Convent , you might notice a young man with Aramaic writing tattooed on his arms. Curious, you might then walk over and ask, “Excuse...

(on the road to) Weyto, Ethiopia It's Christmastime, which means the TV-version of Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas! , published in 1957, has been in a few of our living rooms. Among other things it's a nice little travel story, showing the positive effect that sliding off our perch and encountering our neighbors...

Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Tennessee/North Carolina About a year ago I was sitting in a church and during the service a friend of mine, Adam, stood up to read a passage from the Gospel of Luke, in which John the Baptist begins his work preaching and baptizing in the Jordan Valley. There is a...

Jordan Valley, Israel/Palestine It’s not everyday that you stand on the side of a highway, a car pulls over, you get in, and moments later the driver says you’re an answer to prayer. Up until this car stopped, the day had been full of disappointments. I had left Jerusalem that morning and gone to Jericho...

Dead Sea, Israel There's something to be said about sitting at 3:00 o'clock in the morning on a rocky beach 1385 feet below sea level, gazing up at the Milky Way as your mineral-slimed body smells of the Dead Sea , that famous body of water from which you've just pulled your own not-quite-so-famous body...

These days it seems like everyone is doing one of those 365 photo projects. There are loads of communities online where participants can post their daily photos and view those of others. Flickr has grown to be one of the largest and most popular photo hosting and sharing sights. A simply search for 365 photos...

Istanbul, Turkey I'm typing this post from a coffee shop in Jerusalem, and I'm resonating with an opening line of -- and I'm a little embarrassed to say this -- a soap opera I used to watch during a summer break or two in my elementary school years: "Like sands through the hourglass, so are...

Over at Shetravels , an image-intensive, witty travel blog chronicles the account of a woman and her husband who are spending a year traveling around the world. The pictures are basically travel porn: if you can sit at your desk drooling over them and NOT want to give everything up and move to Cambodia, you're...

Jerusalem In her book Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman’s Skiff , Rosemary Mahoney recounts the following: The French naturalist Charles Sonnini had witnessed a clitoridectomy while in Egypt in 1778 and reported that the woman who performed the surgery had told him if the clitoris was allowed to grow unchecked “by the age...

LIFE.com recently put up a set of never-before published photos of the Hell's Angels from 1965. Check out these quotes from the photo captions -- there's something shared between the mid-60's Hell's Angels and the RTW travelers of today. Of course, the list of things NOT in common is plenty long -- independent travelers aren't...

Qadisha Valley, Lebanon There are places in this world that urge you to pause, and Lebanon’s Qadisha Valley is one. As the day ends over this historic landscape, you look around and sense that the sun has set here for thousands of years, well before you were born, and will continue to set long after...

Sometimes as a solo traveler you need a bit more amusement; you don't have someone to tell you offensive jokes or about their first sexual experience, and you're tired of staring out the train windows at scenery or communicating by hand gestures and large grins at local small children. So then it's fun to set...

As readers may remember from July, I was a guest of the Tourism Authority of Thailand for their “Thailand Today” Mega Familiarization Trip , celebrating TAT and Thai Airways 50th anniversary. One of over 500 travel industry professionals, we were given the opportunity to experience several activities in and around Bangkok and Chiang Mai ....